My phone beeps. A text. ‘Go home. Please.’ Oh fuck off, I think wearily throwing it on the bed. Whoever it is has turned polite. No more ‘bitch’. Even says please. Nutter.
Later, in the dining room, my landlady brings food to fellow guests at the next table. A large white dinner plate with breakfast cast adrift in the middle: a single slice of white edged bacon; an egg that glistens with fat like well-oiled flesh in sun cream; a sausage burst in the middle and arched like a bow; an undercooked half tomato. I smile weakly at her.
“Just orange juice and toast this morning, thanks.”
She clears the other tables while I scrape a little sweet lime marmalade on dry, brittle toast. Her fifteen-year-old daughter wants to be an actress; I get a blow-by-blow account of her performance as Sandy in the school production of Grease. The details float outwards, upwards; light and inconsequential as dandelion chaff. Inside, I am with James Cory watching him shrivel. Shrivel over and over and over again. The landlady chats on. She doesn’t know. There is nothing about me that tells her. Infidelity. Betrayal. Murder. Secrecy. We are strangers, all of us.
CHAPTER TWO
I don’t get to Cory Construction as planned. I lie on the bed after breakfast, waiting for the waves of nausea to recede. When my phone rings, my heart skips a beat and I glance nervously at the screen. Number withheld. This continual phone intrusion is unsettling, as if the cold breath of a stalker blows the hairs on my neck with his whispering, yet I cannot see him. A flash of anger erupts inside me that someone thinks they can scare me in this way, but still my fingers tremble slightly as I press ‘Accept call’. I say nothing, waiting for the caller to speak first.
“Rebecca?” An older woman’s voice. For a moment I think it is Peggy and am torn between relief and a wish that I had not answered.
“Rebecca Connaghan?”
The voice is too frail to be Peggy.
“Yes?” My voice is sharp, almost hostile with unease.
“This is Jackie Sandford.”
The surprise makes me unable to process an answer. I become aware of the television playing softly in the background and run my hand over the rumpled duvet looking for the remote control.
“I got your number from my brother, James Sandford.”
“I… I don’t know your brother.” I sit down on the edge of the bed, switching off the television. “Do I?”
“You phoned him looking for me.”
The memory comes back of the Highland telephone directory and the two Sandfords listed: Angus and James.
“But he said you weren’t connected.”
She ignores this.
“I don’t want you to tell anyone you have spoken to me.”
Her voice sounds a little weak, but determined. There is something else mixed in. Anxiety, perhaps even fear. Her age… the idea that she should still feel fear… it makes my back prickle.
“Where are you? Can I come to see you?”
“No. I live a long way away.”
“Where?”
She senses the urgency, my eagerness, and retreats suddenly.
“I can’t tell you that.”
Everything has been so strange the last few days, so unnerving, that I suddenly wonder for a minute if this is a trick. Is it really Jackie Sandford? I wait for her to speak again, unwilling to frighten her off with persistent questions.
“Rebecca…” She says the name fondly, with a hint of nostalgia. “I wish I could meet you but…” Her voice falters. I am listening acutely to every signal. “Your mum and I… We were close… for a while.”
That phrase ‘for a while’ alerts me but I cannot hold on to the thought long enough to work it out.
“I remember you as a little girl,” she is saying now. “I looked after you.” She does not laugh and yet I sense amusement. “You were a thrawn wee thing.”
An unexpected rush of emotion. Memories of days of which I have no recollection prompt a yearning I had no idea I even felt. A yearning for a kind of innocence before the ugliness. I want the world restored, made whole again.
“Do you know what happened to my mother?”
“You haven’t promised yet.”
“Promised what?”
“That you won’t say you have spoken to me. I can’t risk it.”
“Why not?”
“That will become obvious. But you have to promise me.”
“I don’t have any choice then.”
“I’m sorry.”
Her voice holds genuine regret.
“How do you know I will even keep my promise?”
“I don’t.” She sounds suddenly exhausted. “I have to trust you. For Kath’s sake.”
My mother’s name is almost a whisper.
“I promise.”
“Thank you.”
There is a slightly awkward silence before I plunge in.
“I read the old newspapers… the stuff you said about my mother having an affair with James Cory.”
“Yes. James was furious with me…”
“You said she was going to talk to him about their future the day she disappeared. Are you certain about that?”
“Yes. I tried to talk her out of it. I told her not to take things to the brink because he would never leave his wife. She was risking everything.”
“How did you know? That Cory would never leave his wife, I mean.”
There is silence, and for a moment I think we have lost connection.
“Jackie?”
“Because I…” She stops. I know she is distressed even though I cannot see her. I can feel it. “I just… I just knew him.”
“You sounded like you were going to say something else there.”
“Did I?”
“How did you know?”
She does not answer.
“How did you know?” I coax, more softly.
“Because I had an affair with him too.”
In the silence I cross to the window. The light is pure and bright and penetrating. I think of Lochglas, the small village across the bridge. A tiny, godforsaken backwater. Peaceful, you’d think. But that beautiful little spot, where the sun’s rays hit the sheltered bay like bands of polished gold, has the same tarnished ugliness as everywhere else. People are people and wherever they gather there is love and jealousy and betrayal and confusion. And turning from the window, putting my back to the spotlight, I know I must include myself in that.
My mother never knew, she tells me. And Jackie wasn’t seeing Cory at the same time. In fact, he dumped her for my mother.
“I thought, stupidly, that I was the one. I wasn’t married at the time and I thought he would leave Anna for me. But the truth was…” Her voice trails away. “The truth was what it always is in these matters,” she concludes quietly.
It fascinates me, that little shard of bitterness in her voice. All these years later. The rejection of it still hurts.
My mother had fallen into the same trap.
“She thought, just as I had, that he was going to leave Anna for her. She told me that she was going to speak to him the day they met for lunch, the day she went missing.”
“But maybe she didn’t speak to him. We’ll never know.”
“But we do know. I spoke to her.”
“When?”
“After lunch.”
My heart skips a beat at her words and I cross back over to the bed and sit on the edge before my legs give way. She spoke to my mother after lunch. My mother and Cory were seen leaving the restaurant together, but the call to Jackie Sandford proves Cory did actually leave her. Kath was still alive when he went and she called Jackie Sandford shortly after. Cory was back in his office at 2 p.m. It couldn’t have been him.
CHAPTER THREE
My voice sounds alien even to me as I stumble out questions. High and strained.
“What time? What time did she phone you?”
“About five minutes after James left her. She was on a high about what had happened over lunch and wanted to talk.
There was only me. She was sort of laughing but I could tell by her voice she was shaking a bit, you know that way you get when you are sort of excited but sort of scared at the same time. She said James had been angry at first but everything had ended well.”
“Angry? What was he angry about?”
“Kath had talked to him about when he was going to leave Anna and he was making the usual excuses. She pushed things a bit and in the end he agreed.”
“What do you mean she pushed things?”
Jackie Sandford sounds tired.
“It’s complicated.”
“I have time,” I say, but she doesn’t reply. “If you do?” I add.
“I’m not very well,” she says.
Oh God, don’t let her hang up.
“Please.”
“I can only talk to you this once. I can’t do this again.”
“You won’t have to. I promise.”
“Wait a minute.”
I hear a door creak as it opens and she says something in a low voice. There is the sound of water running. A glass being filled? A muttered thanks. I can hear a voice, high, concerned. Don’t get upset, the voice is saying, then it becomes too muffled to hear before rising again in pitch. Mum, sit down! Yes, yes. Just a little longer. A shuffling. Another creak of the door before it closes firmly. The receiver knocks against a table.
“Are you still there?”
“Yes, I’m here, Jackie.”
“Like I said, it’s complicated…”
Jackie tells me Cory’s business had been doing well at the time. Maybe too well. He had picked up a lot of council contracts and people were talking. Cory was a Mason – and so were the chief executive and the chief planning officer at the council. My mother had told Cory she knew enough about the contracts to create a stink and drop him in it.
I close my eyes momentarily. What the hell had my mother been playing at?
“Why did she want someone who had to be blackmailed into being with her?” I ask.
“She didn’t see it like that. She said she was just persuading him to do what he really wanted anyway,” says Jackie. “She was giving him a reason to keep her sweet. She kept laughing. I’m not sure how much she’d had to drink that lunchtime. But she said men like Cory were fascinated by her. They liked her manipulations. It excited them, she said. But she really got James wrong because he was the one who always had to be in control. I told her she was being silly but she wouldn’t listen. She said she was going to phone Joe right there and then to tell him that she’d made up her mind.”
“Did she?”
“I don’t know. I never spoke to her again.”
“You never said this in the papers.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I told you, James was furious when I told a journalist about their affair.”
“And why did you? Tell them, I mean.”
“Because nothing was happening. The police were interviewing the same people over and over and getting nowhere. I knew there had to be more publicity, another twist to the story to keep the pressure on…”
“On who?”
She doesn’t answer the question directly.
“On whoever killed Kath. So I gave a little bit more of the story each time, hoping that it would prompt something, some kind of new lead.”
That was true. I had noticed in the library that Jackie Sandford’s story had unfolded over the course of several articles.
“Why did you stop?”
“I moved.”
“Because of what happened?”
“James…”
She stops abruptly.
“What? What did he do?”
“It was hard to prove.”
I wait. There is the sound of a glass being placed back on a table.
“When I first spoke,” she continues, “he got in touch and told me to keep my mouth shut because I wasn’t helping to find Kath’s killer. All I was doing was ruining his reputation.”
“But you ignored him?”
“At first. But then everything started going wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Masons, Rebecca… How much do you know about them?”
“Very little.”
“About as much as most Masons know, then,” she mutters.
Every so often there is an acerbity to Jackie Sandford’s tone that moves her out of the linen-and-lavender, old-lady category. Maybe that’s what my mother liked about her. From what I’ve heard about her, I doubt Kath would have turned into linen and lavender either.
Jackie suggests I do some research online. Masonic secrecy and corruption is well documented now. The fact that in those days, senior Masons who reached the ‘top’ third layer had no idea there were another thirty-three secret layers above. But most Masons, she says, thought they were buying into a benign organisation that had brotherhood at its core. If a Mason died, for instance, brother Masons would sometimes secretly ensure – through a Masonic bank manager – that his debts were paid off for his family.
“A kind of Christianity?” I ask.
“A kind of mafia,” she retorts. “Oh, the values it expounded sounded decent. Look after your brothers, all that. But any organisation that looks after its own at the expense of others runs the risk of corruption.”
“But what did that have to do with you moving away?”
“They’re everywhere.”
“Who?”
“The Masons!” she snaps, irritation breaking through the fatigue in her voice. “Sorry,” she mutters. “I’m in a bit of pain.”
Before I can ask what’s wrong with her she has launched into an explanation of the power of the Masons as a national network. Bank managers, judges, chief executives, senior policemen, the major utilities… It’s the most powerful secret society on earth, she says. And if a group of Masons come together and unite against an individual, they can make that person’s life hell.
The first thing that happened was her electricity going off. She didn’t realise what was going on to begin with. The electricity board said it was a recurring fault they couldn’t locate. Then they claimed her bill hadn’t been paid, before suddenly ‘finding’ the paperwork. Next her bank refused to honour a cheque, saying she was overdrawn. It got sorted out but it was never fully explained.
It all sounds so implausible that I begin to wonder about Jackie Sandford and how reliable she is. But she has story after story. A top judge who reached the pinnacles of British Freemasonry then decided it was incompatible with his Christianity and spilled the beans. A businessman who had a dispute with a Mason and found himself taken in by a Masonic police chief to be questioned on charges of pornography.
“What happened to him?”
“He committed suicide.”
“Oh God…”
“And I can understand why. The pressure gets to you. It was bad enough for me at the start but after the second newspaper interview, all hell broke loose. It wasn’t just constant interruptions to my electricity and water supplies, which would be off for days and miraculously come back on again an hour or two before workmen arrived. It was the police. They continually stopped me when I was out in my car to run checks on the registration, or to check the insurance, or to examine the tyres. It was harassment. I had to disconnect the phone because it would ring constantly but there would be nobody there when I answered. Then there was a break-in at my house. I was a nervous wreck in the end. I couldn’t take any more.”
I know what she means. The anonymous texts to me in the last few days have been nothing compared to what she endured but the effect has been insidious, creeping through me in the way cold seeps into you unnoticed, until suddenly you are freezing and unable to get warm. The first text barely touched me. But then it built up. A gradual sense of fear when the phone buzzed. A weakening of control. An uncharacteristic helplessness. You get gradually worn away, the way the surface of rock gets eroded under the relentless crash of waves. So yes, I understand Ja
ckie Sandford’s eventual breakdown. But there was one thing I didn’t understand.
“Why would sane people go to those lengths to support Cory?” I ask.
I don’t understand about organisations. Rules. Authority. I couldn’t join an army or wear a uniform. It’s all I can do to smile when the police stop me for routine checks when I’m driving. Instinctively, I want to tell them to piss off. That’s what uniforms do to me. But even I can sort of see why an army or a police force might be necessary. But a secret society? What for?
“I’ve had plenty of years to look into it, Rebecca. Plenty of time to reflect. There’s a bit in the Masonic handbook that says you have to conceal all the crimes of your brother Masons. And should you be summoned as a witness against him, you must always be sure to shield him.”
“So what charges were Cory’s ‘brothers’ trying to shield him from – corruption or murder?”
“That’s the question. That’s what I was trying to find out at the time. But the truth is I got so scared I had to get out. I didn’t dare say any more. I married, changed my name, and moved away.”
“But all these years later… surely…”
“My family…”
“Are you frightened still?”
“Not of that,” she says softly. “Not of him. But my family… It’s simpler just to make sure.”
“Jackie. Did…?”
Suddenly I cannot get the words out. They are stuck in my throat. Da. My Da.
“I know what you are going to ask.” She is suddenly gentle, compassionate.
“I don’t know, Rebecca. I can’t pretend to know. But I know your father was a good man.”
“You said she phoned you after lunch.” Despair fills me. “She was alive when he left. How could Cory have killed her?”
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